As war raged through Europe in 1915, Ottoman authorities commenced the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians—the first genocide of modern history. A teenage boy named Kaspar Hovannisian was among the surviving generation of Amenians who escaped the ruins of their ancestral homeland and built communities around the world and followed the American dream to the San Joaquin Valley of California, where he cultivated a small farm and began investing in real estate. But memories of Armenia also survived—a legacy of love, anguish, and faith in a national rebirth. Kaspar's son Richard left the family farm, ready to defend the history of a lost nation against the forces of time and denial; he helped to pioneer the field of Armenian studies in the U.S. and became a worldwide authority on genocide. Richard's son Raffi was also haunted and inspired by the past; in 1989 he left his law firm in Los Angeles to stage the original act of repatriation to Soviet Armenia, where he went on to play a historic role in the creation of a new and independent republic. In this book—part investigative memoir and part history of the Armenian people—Raffi's son Garin Hovannisian, tells his family's story.